Hm, if I used a git branch per pulumi stack for dev/stage/prod would it be wise to create a githook to execute a stack switch with pulumi upon git checkout to another branch?

Effectively, that's exactly right. The specific details do depend a lot on what CI/CD system you're using, although you say "githook" so I wonder, are you doing this without a CI/CD server and wanting to execute the commands as local git hooks? For CI, there are some good pointers here: https://pulumi.io/reference/cd-travis/. If you end up down the road breaking your project into many stacks, you'll need something like https://blog.pulumi.com/continuous-delivery-with-gitlab-and-pulumi-on-amazon-eks, however if you're sticking to "monolithic" stacks for dev/stage/prod (by far, the easiest option), then the CI/CD docs above should suffice.

Awesome thank you! We're doing it manually in the terminal first to get the dev team used to all these new tools, then will automate with CI/CD. Yup we're monolithic for the most part out the gate.

Sounds great -- don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions.

kk got it 🙂 appreciate it

Because it's java script, your flexibility is high! Consider a build script, using any of multiple task runners, or your own task runner where you:

const BRANCH = execSync(`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`).toString('utf8').trim()
const STACK = `exampleOrg/${BRANCH}`

var tasks = {
  update: () => {
    sh(`pulumi update -y --skip-preview --stack ${STACK}`)
    tasks.test()
  }
  ,test: () => {
    sh(`npm ${options.debug? 'run test-debug':'test'}`)
  }
}

You can even get the branch from inside your index.ts script and change up your stack inputs from the same stack, based on what branch you are on.

awesome thanks for the tip!